Talk at VIA is how to gain political clout

Updated 1:24 am, Wednesday, February 22, 2012

An audio recording of a recent VIA Metropolitan Transit public work session offers a candid look into the authority, providing a picture of VIA's financial outlook — shrinking operating funds to meet growing demand — and its strategies to more aggressively court political allies.

VIA Board Chairman Henry Muñoz III encouraged his fellow board members to dole out campaign contributions to elected officials to get their attention.

“If somebody on this (VIA) board doesn't make political contributions and maintain that kind of relationship separate from the board, I don't know how you get your phone calls returned,” Muñoz said, adding moments later, “I don't know who else makes contributions to Congress people.”

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The statements were made during a Jan. 18 intergovernmental relations committee work session, the recording of which was obtained by the San Antonio Express-News through an open records request.

Participants included VIA CEO and President Keith Parker, several board members and staffers, a consultant, the city's director of government relations, and agency lobbyists.

The meeting was open to the public, and its agenda was posted on the VIA website.

Questioned later about his suggestion, Muñoz said it was made amid a discussion about how to ensure VIA gets access to the same funding resources transit agencies in cities like Austin, Houston and Dallas, which collect a higher sales tax.

“That was in the context of a brainstorming session, so yes, it may have been hyperbolic,” Muñoz said.

“It was a workshop. It wasn't a policy-making board meeting. It was to brainstorm ideas about how VIA can compete in the world that it lives in,” said Muñoz.

Among the other topics discussed at the workshop were:

• VIA may not have enough funding to expand its operating capacity to meet higher ridership demands.

Last year, VIA successfully identified $190 million from the city, county and its own bond funding to build a downtown streetcar line and another $49 million for other system improvements.

“It's my expectation that as, particularly as streetcar gets introduced, and all these new amenities are hanging out there, we're going to attract a ton of new people to the services and we'll be strained to our limits in trying to provide new bus routes, more capacity on existing bus routes and that sort of thing,” Parker said at the meeting.

• A proposal that a grass-roots, public transit advocacy group should form to champion VIA and its projects.

“It's much more effective if there's a grass-roots leader who starts it, and then they can, they can certainly solicit us for information, they can ask us for all sorts of different pieces,” Parker said, “but we just can't lead it.”

Parker said this week, “I want to be very clear that VIA would play no role in anything like that.”

• VIA board members and high-profile staffers like Parker will set up visits with relevant agencies, to improve relationships and counter “the historic image problem of VIA as being insular and self-contained,” Muñoz said.

• VIA will create a department of intergovernmental relations, headed by a senior-level manager who will report directly to Parker.

Parker, responding to questions this week about the agency's funding outlook, said if sales tax receipts grow incrementally or slow, “then our ridership could outstrip our ability to meet all of our demands and wants that are out there.”

But “it's a problem you absolutely embrace,” Parker said.

Most of the January workshop focused on lobbying strategies, and participants outlined who VIA needs to court.

“I don't recall ever having the speaker of the House (Joe Straus) in his hometown cut a ribbon with us,” Muñoz said in the session.

Muñoz said this week VIA needs to show elected officials how public money is being invested in public transit.

But while VIA secured the right to bond its advanced transportation district money during the last legislative session, it failed to get two other initiatives passed, including one that would have allowed buses to use certain highway shoulder lanes. Gov. Rick Perry vetoed the bill.

Muñoz specifically zeroed in on the governor's decision to kill the shoulder lane law, questioning one of the lobbyists present.

“My problem is not knowing the answer,” Muñoz said. “So I guarantee, if I wrote a $50,000 check to Rick Perry, I'd know why he didn't like the bill and vetoed it.”